M comes into my office and looks at my white board on which I have drawn a complex diagram representing the layout of the intranet website that I am developing. He stares at it for a while, and then asks what “Warratees” are. He is a sarcastic bastard, knows that it is a misspelling of “Warranties” – he just likes to pick apart faults.

When he acts this way I tend to react in one of two ways: 1) Ignore him and change the subject, or 2) Go with it and have a little fun.

This time I chose the second option:

Me: “Are you familiar at all with the Manatee?”

M: “Those big sea things?”

Me: “Yes, sea cows.”

M: “Ok”

Me: “The Warratee is actually the warrior caste of the Manatees.”

M: “Ummm, okay…”

Me: “You don’t believe me?”

M: “Well…”

Me: “I have a picture of one, if you don’t believe me.”

M: “Oh really…”, cocks his eyebrow.

Me: “Yeah, I will have to find it, I will bring it in tomorrow.”

M: “I look forward to it!”

I flexed my Photoshop skills and came up with the following:

M was suitably impressed.

Growing up as a kid in Australia my family always had a grill (or “barbie” as we called it), and we used it often. Cooking on the barbie was a central part of my gastronomical experience in my formative years. Even a two-year jaunt to Malaysia involved regular grilled meals peppered amongst the other more adventurous explorations into that culture’s gastronomy.

Growing up as a kid I also learnt that asparagus was one of the nastiest vegetables on this planet. Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, I realize that I had only ever been exposed to canned asparagus: that pale, mushy, tasteless, almost criminal, incarnation of a vegetable that I did not even understand could be purchased fresh until I was much older.

When I had the opportunity to combine these two elements from my childhood, I approached it with a sense of intrigue and trepidation. I had never had fresh asparagus and had only my horrible experiences of the canned stuff to use as a reference point.

Let me cut to the chase and say that asparagus grilled on the barbie is one of the few foods of the gods. I am not exaggerating folks. If you have not tried it, put down the mouse, step away from the keyboard, and go and try it now.

No, seriously.

Now!

For those needing a little holding of the hands:

Get a bunch of asparagus. Cut off the thick end so that the stalks are fairly even along their lengths (don’t cry for the loss – the base tends to be woody in texture and tastes much the same). Put the trimmed asparagus in a large Ziploc bag and add some canola oil, salt, and pepper. Mush the bag around so that the seasonings spread around (I like to do my own little improvised dance while I am doing this), and then let it sit until you have got the barbie ready. Then place the stalks out on the barbie until they are lightly seared. Pay close attention to the flowery heads as these tend to cook much quicker than the rest of the asparagus. Take them off and served immediately as is. Enjoy.

If you ever want to win me over, I highly recommend giving me grilled asparagus. I will be putty in your hands!

I suffer household projects like a calf being roped by some pretentious “cowboy,” only to be dumped unceremoniously onto the ground for the amusement of a few hundred hick spectators. That is, I whine a lot, squeal, and call for my mama.

The remodeling of the guest bathroom was typical then.

Originally perfectly functional, though somewhat worn, and admittedly a little ugly, the guest bathroom was deemed to have somehow committed crimes unspeakable in polite company and sentenced to undergo re-imaging.

Commence squealing.

There I am curled up in a ball on the floor, wondering when mother will come, sucking my thumb and wishing it was a beer, realizing that no parental rescue will be arriving, and that I had just better suck it up and get this thing done so I can get back to beer and all those things that I actually enjoy.

As with all those damn room makeover shows, the first item on the torture checklist is ripping everything out of the room, and then, the often un-televised second item, finding somewhere to put all that crap in the interim.

Next phase in the plan is to render the bathroom completely and utterly non-functional: comprising of removing half of the toilet and taping up drop sheets around the stuff that you don’t want paint to splatter on, that is: everything that you are not painting.

With a guest bathroom that is no longer functioning on any sort of guest bathroom-ish level you proceed to the next step: wall paper removal.

I thank the entities above I did not have to get involved in that process.

I will however curse the entities above for the necessity of involving me in the process of sand painting.

Sand paint is a type of texture paint that is a jewel in the crown of Beelzebub. Thick as soggy clay, it resists going anywhere your roller/brush attempts to coax it. Think of a screaming kid throwing a fit in the middle of say, a grocery store, while its on-the-edge parental figure tries to soothe it. That is sand paint. Maybe quieter.

After the sand paint came the joint compound to be slathered in a mish mash of arcs across the walls for a stucco-like finish. At which point I pleaded for sanity and asked why the necessity for the damn sand paint: to which I was informed that there would be patches left in the joint compoundy swathes through which the sand paint would show giving the impression of stucco that had fallen off.

Great, I am remodeling a bathroom to make it look older than when I started.

I ran for the hills, and did not return until the faux stucco was in place and well and truly dried.

To be fair, when it comes to texturing there actually can be too many chefs in the kitchen – a person has their own particular way of texturing – having more than one doing it ends up with some sections looking one way, the other looking another. This is a classy operation I am running here, folks.

Next chapter in this already exceeded its welcome project is actually painting the walls with, gasp, color.

Will someone explain to me why it is that whenever I paint, I end up with clothing, skin and hair that anyone would look at and wonder: Dude, did you run out of brushes and just use whatever was handy?

I thought I had done a perfectly good job at painting all the nooks and crannies of the stucco texture until I re-installed the light kit above the mirror.

“Let there be light”

*flicks switch*

A moment passes…

“Fuck.”

That is how I ended up giving the walls and the ceiling a second coat of paint. It appears the light of day compares poorly with the light of six 60 watt bulbs when determining if you’ve done a good painting job or not. Whistling while I worked was certainly not the order of business that day, instead I consoled myself by coming up with creatively colorful curses which I muttered under my breath as I used whatever parts of my body were available (and sometimes a brush) to get the second coat on.

Finally it was done. The slightly worn, slightly ugly guest bathroom is gone, replaced with a newer-older, but pretty damn spiffy looking one, and I can sit back down on my toilet, look around at all the hard work, smile, and think:

“Fuck, I have to tile the floor now.”

For the past week, I have had no television. I have one TV, and over several days, I noticed that the picture had been becoming darker and the contrast had been going out. Then last weekend the picture went out altogether.

A TV technician came out midweek and determined that heating element and circuit board needed replacing. Yesterday he returned with the part and replaced returning my TV from inanimate furniture back to full TV-ness.

A week without TV.

TV is not something that I cannot live without. I do not watch much TV anyway. The total sum of my viewing largely consists of:

- No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain (Travel Channel)
- Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern (Travel Channel)
- Torchwood (BBC America)
- Red Dwarf (BBC America)
- USA the Wright Way (Travel Channel)

Occasionally I find a new episode of You Are What You Eat (BBC America). Sometimes I will sit down in front of Good Eats (Food Channel), and occasionally late at night I will recline on one of my futons and be amused by a re-run of MASH.

Overall, in a given week, that’s not a lot of TV viewing. So losing my only TV for a week did not have a huge impact, but it was certainly a noticeable one, as I usually watch TV while eating my dinner. Without TV, the dinner experience was completely changed (I was amused to learn that I could still listen to the TV, just not see it, and after a few comments like “Oooh, I wouldn’t mind seeing that!” I felt a tad pathetic and turned the sound off too).

My TV is back in operation now, $340 later, but the picture is much better and now I can catch up on my shows that have been recording all week.

I came home one evening after work to discover that my fenced backyard had become, at some point during the day, much less fenced.

As you can imagine, it was a bit of a shock to turn up to your driveway after a long day at work and discover a fence that had looked perfectly normal about ten hours prior.

This is a shot of the fence from inside the yard looking out onto the driveway. I am thankful that the left corner panel did not fall completely, taking out the newly planted Confederate Rose in the process.

In addition, there was some other less photo-worthy minor damage done to other sections around the fence. Six panels in total tried to revolt against the fence-like duties that day.

The cause for all this damage was apparently wind. I had noticed it was windy that day, but had not reckoned that it would be wild enough to give my fence a run for its money (and succeed).

I ended up screwing all the panels back in place that evening. I never understood the use of nails on wood fencing (other than sheer economics) as screws are so much more resilient in their duties securing two pieces of wood together that nails pale in comparison.

After all was said and done, I realized that I have a very aged fence that is going to need replacing sooner rather than later. A new major project has been added to my list of things to repair or rebuild. At least this will give me the opportunity to build the higher privacy fence that I have always wanted.

Two of my co-workers came into my office one evening at work as is unusual for them to do. They appeared to me in the midst of a heated discussion as they often are and wanted me to adjudicate.

“M claims that Wingstop Chicken Wings would taste better than my homemade Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli!” gasped U.

“There is no way that your Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli could stand up to Wingstop Chicken Wings!” flailed M.

U rolled his eyes, “See what I have to deal with here?”

Me: “Wait, what flavor of Chicken Wings?”

M: “Cajun. Also Atomic”

Me: “I dunno U, that’s a pretty tall order. Wingstop’s Chicken Wings are pretty damn good.”

U: “I can’t believe you are siding with M on this!”

Me: “I am not, I am just saying that’s a pretty big mountain to topple”

This conversation went around and around, with various puffing of chests and other manly stuff. Apparently at some point it actually devolved into a official contest between the two, with actual judges and stuff.

Wow.

That was not the least of it. Apparently, in all this posturing and feather displaying, I somehow got involved in the contest, supplying my own chicken dish to go up against the Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli in one corner, and the Wingstop Chicken Wings in the other. My reaction to this sudden involvement, humorously, adds up to a lengthened version of the two initials of the main combatants involved in this dispute: “UM”

I told them both that I would have to think about a dish to contribute to this affair, and overnight I came up with Lime Chicken.

On the day before the big battle I composed an email inviting the five (largely unaware judges) to participate in the following day’s battle and to determine a winner that would settle this dispute that I somehow was dragged into.

For the email I devised a concept for the battle that mirrored the Iron Chef battles so popularized by the Food Network:

I blanked out the faces of my two competitors because they have no idea that I am posting this picture. I would say that the odds are thusly stacked in your favor for guessing which one I am.

I prepared my dish the evening before, and then warmed it up in that morning before I went into work. As lunch approached, M went and bought the Cajun and Atomic wings from Wingstop.

Shortly after, the judges started trickling in, and then as word of the battle spread throughout the company, volunteer judges started arriving until the point that we had double the number of judges that we had originally invited.

It was a fun day, with lots of people saying nice things about our dishes.

At the end of the day we tallied up the score cards (yes we even printed out little score cards that the judges could score the dishes one) and the final tally was:

1st – U’s Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli
2nd – My Lime Chicken
3rd – M’s Cajun and Atomic Wings

I would have been terribly crushed if I had not tasted U’s Chicken, Cheese and Broccoli and been very impressed, so I only ended up mildly hurt.

The moral of the victory that both U and I claimed over M was that home cooked food could indeed outdo the store bought stuff.* Sweet!

*Your results may vary.